The present invention relates to a method for manufacturing tubular items, particularly hosiery items, closed at an axial end, by means of circular hosiery knitting machines or the like.
It is known that hosiery items are generally manufactured on circular hosiery knitting machines and that in the conventional manufacturing method they are unloaded from the machine while their toe is still open and must be subjected to subsequent sewing or looping in order to form the finished product.
Since the sewing or looping operation requires a manual intervention of an operator to load the hosiery item on the looping or sewing machine, this operation has a significant effect on the overall manufacturing costs of hosiery items.
For this reason, methods and devices have been devised in recent years which are adapted to obtain hosiery items having a closed toe directly on the machine that manufactures them or are adapted to mechanize the transfer of the hosiery items from the machine that produces them to the looping or sewing machine in order to fully eliminate, or at least substantially reduce, manual interventions for performing this operation.
In some of these methods, for example in the method disclosed in Italian patent no. 1,277,396 in the name of the same Assignee, the hosiery item is started from the opposite end with respect to the toe, i.e., from the top of the leg, and is completed at the toe, retaining the last row of knitting on the needles of the machine. Said last row is then transferred, loop by loop, from the needles of the circular machine to the hooks supported by an annular element which is arranged around the upper end of the needle cylinder. The annular element is divided into two halves which can mutually overlap so as to overlap the loops of a half-row, carried by the hooks arranged in one half of the annular element, on the loops of the other half-row, which are supported by the hooks of the other half of the annular element. In a subsequent step, the pairs of loops thus arranged side by side are sewn in order to join them and thus close the toe of the hosiery item, which is then unloaded from the annular element.
The closure of the toe, performed with methods and devices of this kind, suffers the drawback that it is not fully satisfactory from an aesthetic point of view.
The joining of mutually adjacent pairs of loops by sewing in fact does not achieve a tight coupling of the loops that can be compared with the one obtainable by conventional sewing or looping.